Tag Archives: God’s love

A student told me recently she thinks God only created her to fulfill the needs of other people – making food, cleaning house, doing laundry. References to her family – she’s unmarried and keeps house for her widower father and two brothers – always carry a note of conditioned disappointment. She takes care of them all, they do nothing to help her (and, in fact, sometimes the opposite).

I tried to offer briefly another story – one of a God who created us simply to delight in us. To enjoy us and to delight us with Presence. Her name in Hindi means “song” and I was desperate to say something to her that would open her ears to the song of love being sung over her.

This blog has fallen silent over the past few weeks in large part because I’m a teacher again. I’ve got four hours of classes a day I’m responsible for. Eleven students to welcome and to figure out and to teach. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying to be back in the classroom. My students seem to feel the same way.

There’s something about learning something new – perhaps most especially a new language – that leaves people feeling vulnerable at best, like a hopeless idiot at worst. One student is so petrified of saying the wrong thing in front of his classmates, he literally mouthed his answers to me voicelessly for the first several weeks of class. His answers are very nearly always right.

Every student comes with a story about themselves. A story written in their head, but heavily informed by the input of others. One student told me she was humiliated as a child in Hindi class every day by the teacher because she couldn’t do the standard dictation exercises. Another said she tried to explain where she was getting stuck in English to a teacher and was completely dismissed and told she would never understand. It’s all a lot of baggage to be carrying around.

As a teacher, you end up doing this delicate dance of hearing the communication students aren’t willing to say out loud. You look for the students who are trying to hide. You work for ways to show their own potential to the student who thinks they are completely incompetent.

As a teacher, I bring my own baggage too. Just the other day, I found myself correcting students harshly. There was a thinly veiled superiority in the way I explained the present perfect and past perfect tenses. When I stopped to consider why I was suddenly psyco-teacher, I realized I was trying to make up for a morning of feeling like a complete, incompetent idiot. My own mistake and misunderstanding had led to a bunch of wasted time and work. Maybe it would make me feel better if I could prove how awesome I am to my students…

The baggage doesn’t just distract in the classroom, does it? We each one of us are telling ourselves a story about who we are. It is rarely a positive and life-giving story. We dodge relationships because the story in our head says that people will only ever hurt us. We shrink from trying something new because we’ve been told there’s nothing worse than failing. We work desperately to keep up appearances because what will people think if they know we’re exhausted and dying a little on the inside?

But then there are blessed moments when someone looks to hear the communication we’re not willing to say out loud. When someone does the delicate dance of seeking out what we’re trying to hide and naming our own potential. When someone offers grace for our failures, hope in our silence, encouragement for our disappointment. Someone who opens our ears just a little bit to hear the song of love and delight being sung over us. A song that says we have been seen even while trying to hide, known even while trying to fake it and still He has died for us.

More often, I think, we’re too busy hiding ourselves to sing one another into the light. But perhaps, if we learn to sing this song to one another, to offer this bit of grace to one another, the stories we tell ourselves might just become a bit fuller of life.

I didn’t know him personally – he was a friend of some friends – but his personal experiment made news in our circles. We were students at a Bible college, after all. And here he was, consciously deciding not to read his Bible.

It wasn’t the “I’ve-slept-through-my-alarm-the-past-ten-mornings” sort of forgetting that most of us fall into when it comes to our Bible reading routines. He wasn’t putting homework ahead of personal devotions like the rest of us were occasionally frequently doing.

He’d realized his Scripture-reading was happening by rote instead of with desire. He was finding his sense of good-standing before God tied to how long he read his Bible each day. A vague standard of number-of-times-per-week was turning his Bible reading into backbreaking drudgery rather than life-giving freedom.

And so he stopped.

I envied him for his bravery. Letting word get out at a Bible college that you were giving up Bible reading as a sort of reverse spiritual discipline was sure to make more than a few people question your salvation.

But more than that, I envied him because I sensed by own lack of bravery. I could not imagine pulling such a stunt and still finding God’s love at the other end.

My experience in many evangelical Christian circles is that we give lip-service to freedom while yanking leashes attached to choke collars, viciously keeping one another in line. It’s more often our fellow believers’ guilt trips, not God’s kindness, that is leading us to repentance. Our mythological ideal Christian isn’t someone who falls harder and harder every day on God’s extravagant grace, but someone who reads only Christian books, attends church every Sunday, and serves without faltering or question.

The fact that we have an “ideal Christian” at all should probably disturb us more than it does.

It’s not that I don’t see wisdom in practicing spiritual disciplines like reading Scripture, prayer, fellowship, and ministry on a regular basis. But doing them for their own sake is a yoke too heavy to bear. Doing them out of obligation to keep your good standing with God will crush you.

The end of his experiment didn’t quite get storied around like the beginning. There were rumors that the break did wonders for his love of Scripture. That giving himself freedom from the imposed standards of “good Christian” actually made his desire for Word and prayer increase.

I never did find the courage to ask. Maybe because I didn’t want to know that the list of rules I was straining to keep (and teaching to others) was meaningless after all. Maybe because I didn’t want to lose the comfort of standards by which to judge myself and others. Maybe because I decided that finding the immoral woman’s passion required just a bit too much risk in leaving my own goodness behind.

And for a long while afterwards, I tried to keep pace with the jerk of the leash while proclaiming myself free.

The one time I want a chatty seat mate on the train, the auntie next to me seems more intent on cleaning out her chana daal snack packet than plying me with the usual questions. I snap up every small chance she throws me, over wording my answers, giving more information than is required. Anything to keep my eyes from the monsoon-lush scenery slipping by the train tracks. Scenery that for so long has meant home, arrival, close. Now it means leaving, far, away.

I wrestled God so hard about this place. I begged to be released to leave. I prayed often not another month longer! Every time I pleaded, though, He whispered, “Just a little bit longer, a little bit longer, dear one”. Until my complaints fell away. Until the aversion was replaced by a steady, hard-won peace and pleasure.

And now that I’m leaving, it feels like my very lungs are attached to the buildings we’re passing – stretching out an impossible distance. Someone is squeezing my heart so hard it is squirting out my eyes.

I realize by the auntie’s huffy sigh that I’m asking about all of her relatives’ occupations for a second time. I give up the distraction scheme and turn to watch the River – broad and muddy and swirling – disappear beneath us. I marvel how my initial hatred has turned to such deep hurt at leaving.

I wonder if I should regret all that time wasted being argumentative, but instantly I know better. I think there had to be a wrestle before there was love. And I don’t think Jacob regretted the limp once he got the name Israel.

Mental note to my future self: The next time you find yourself in a place you don’t want to be or circumstances you find impossible, the next time there is wrestling to be done, wrestle with everything you’ve got. Throw your very self into the fray and stay. When every fiber in your being wants to run, when every last tendon aches with the strain of the fight – suck in a painful breath and wrestle on. There is so much grace on the other side of faithful, love you did not even imagine.

Maybe you will come away beat up – but I guarantee you won’t regret the limp.